A Diagnostic Method Based on Tongue Imaging Morphology

The tongue morphology analysis is an important part of imaging diagnosis of tongue inspection. This paper studies and analyzes the tongue shape to establish a kind of tongue diagnosis method based on tongue images. CCD devices were employed to acquire the front and lateral images of tongue, and then measure the tongue's length (L), width (K) and height (H). Furthermore, in 500 testees with possible disorders, the coefficient of variation(CV) was corrected and adjusted to establish an optimum formula between the body surface area (Mt) and the sum of the width of the tongue (K) and height (H). Clinical studies show that this tongue judgment method is of high accuracy. The accuracy rate for fat tongue and thin tongue reaches 93.40% and 88.57% respectively. In addition, this method has been proven to be valuable in the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, chronic gastritis and hyperthyroidism.